For many households, 'Thou Shalt Recycle' has become the 11th Commandment. But some have claimed that we are worshipping a false idol.
Elizabeth Grice, The Telegraph 31 Jan 09;
The Thursday morning cacophony of rubbish collection in our north London road is as sweet as birdsong. In fact, it is the new dawn chorus. No one minds how long the rubbish lorry – or "stillage vehicle" – jams the cul-de-sac, or for how long, or how loud the din of breaking glass. There are never any complaints. This is because the weekly ritual of having the contents of our three recycling boxes sorted by hand and emptied into the vehicle's honeycomb of compartments reassures us once again that we have done the Right Thing. As the crews in their protective clothing swarm like flies over our waste, separating it as we watch, our whiffy labours of the night before are amply justified: we know we are helping to save the planet.
But a maggot of unease has crept into that satisfying thought lately. Are our plastic bottles really being recycled into more plastic bottles? Is the glassy detritus of the weekend's party – diligently sorted at the kerbside into green, brown and clear – becoming more glass bottles? Are our Bran Flakes boxes stuck in a council stockpile because China's recycling industry has collapsed? Are our potato peelings ending up in landfill, producing the evil greenhouse gas methane, instead of being safely digested?
An adviser on waste management suggested last week that it could be more damaging to the environment to ship material 3,000 miles away to be recycled, than to send it to an incinerator five miles down the road. But Wrap (Waste and Resources Action Programme), the Government's recycling quango, argues that sending used plastic bottles and paper to China – assuming that they are not then landfilled – produces less CO2 than sending them to landfill at home. Householders are confused. The 11th commandment, Thou Shalt Recycle, looks a shakier tenet than it did.
There is no question that, as an article of faith, recycling has taken hold. For two-thirds of households in Britain, it is now a way of life. In 2001, only 11 per cent of the nation's 10 million tons of municipal rubbish was recycled. Now it is 34 per cent. By 2020, the aim is 50 per cent. That is still behind Flanders (which is at 70 per cent) and Austria, the Netherlands and Germany (already at 50 per cent) but far ahead of Greece, where 90 per cent of waste goes to landfill.
Recycling saves energy, reduces raw material extraction and combats climate change. Everyone agrees on that. It takes 95 per cent less energy to make a recycled aluminium can than to make one from virgin materials. According to Friends of the Earth, recycling saves 10 to 15 million tonnes of CO2 a year – the equivalent of taking 3.5 million cars off Britain's roads. It is better for the environment than incinerators or landfills… and besides, we are running out of landfill sites.
But recycling has a complex hierarchy. In the London borough of Hackney, my recycling boxes are in relatively safe hands, because "kerbside sorting" makes for a better class of rubbish. Not all councils operate like this. Some use "commingled" recycling because it is cheaper. That way, householders put everything except food into one receptacle, which is trucked to an MRF (Materials Recovery Facility) where automated sorting separates recoverable items by size, weight and type. Although there is a huge environmental benefit to recycling glass – each ton re-melted in the UK saves 314kg of CO2 – last year, 280,000 tons of glass collected for recycling was only fit for aggregate because it had not been colour-separated.
When plastics, paper, aluminium and glass are kept separate, there is less chance of contamination. So they are worth more to the council and more to the environment. Alan Laing, a Hackney councillor, says this method offers the best chance of genuine recycling. "We have satisfied ourselves, as much as we can, that these materials aren't just going somewhere else in the world to be landfilled."
But they cannot really be sure, and it is no part of their remit to find out. Hackney gives its residents a neat map showing where their recyclables end up – oil to Cambridgeshire, foil to Walthamstow, tins and cans to Wales, kitchen waste to Edmonton. But beyond that, rubbish's onward journey can take it stupendous distances. Not least to China. A coloured plastic bottle sent to Greenwich might well end up 6,000 miles away in Taiwan.
That is not necessarily bad, say waste experts: this is a global market. We collect more paper than we can recycle, but there will continue to be a demand for it in China. Marcus Gover, of Wrap, says that despite the global economic slowdown, and a drop in prices for paper and plastics, the Chinese recycling market is stabilising. Reports of stockpiled raw materials are scaremongering, he suggests. "More than 95 per cent of our recycling is still getting through. There is no evidence of big stockpiles."
Although Britain lacks the infrastructure to deal with its rubbish mountain, there is room for optimism in the re-processing of plastics. Closed Loop London, a new £13 million plastics reprocessing plant in Dagenham, is turning 35,000 tons of used bottles back into food-grade plastic. When similar plants open in Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, they should handle most of Britain's 180,000 tons of plastic bottles a year without recourse to China.
"If we don't meet our targets," says Laing, "we will end up with more going to landfill and incineration. Councils pay £40 for every ton of rubbish sent to landfill. It is a cost time-bomb."
Separate food waste collections, say the experts, offer the biggest potential for making recycling more efficient. This is because food waste can be treated biologically – broken down by micro-organisms – and doesn't produce methane. In an impressive greener-than-thou initiative, Sainsbury is renouncing its old landfill habits. The supermarket's yearly landfill use, most of it ready meals, stale bread and rotten fruit, has been 80,000 tons: more than the weight of the Titanic. But by the summer, it aims to have stopped the practice altogether.
For the past five months, instead of sending lorries organic waste from its Northamptonshire distribution centre and 38 surrounding stores, it has been trucking it to an anaerobic digester operated by a small company called Biogen Greenfinch.
The digester is essentially a large steel stomach. It speeds up the breakdown of waste from years to days by feeding it into an oxygen-starved environment infested with microbes. The process generates a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane that is burnt for heat and power. What's left is sold as manure for local cereal farms – and the heat is piped to a nearby immigrant detention centre.
The supermarket plans to build five more "food-to-energy sites" in the next two years, shaving £2 million off its £9 million disposal bill – and hopes one day to sell surplus power to the grid.
Landfill sites, which release climate-change gases and pollute soil and water, still take most of Britain's waste. Increasing landfill prices, and the prospect of fines unless they reduce the amount of biodegradable waste they send there, has sent councils scrambling for alternatives, such as incineration.
Not that they call it incineration: too many overtones of smoking chimneys. Energy from Waste (EfW) is the preferred term. There are 17 EfWs in England and one in Wales dealing with household rubbish. Modern, well-managed EfW plants release fewer chemicals than old incinerators and are said to be less air-polluting – dioxin emissions have been reduced by 99.8 per cent since 1990 – but they are still environmentally inferior to recycling.
Friends of the Earth argue that however "clean" an incinerator, the most effective and sustainable way of diverting rubbish from landfill sites is to implement a good recycling and composting collection scheme.
Which brings us back to the householder and the kerbside. The battle for hearts and minds has to be fought daily to ensure there is no backsliding. That is why good practitioners will spend time reminding residents that their efforts are not futile. Letting the public know what happens to the materials when they have been collected reinforces the feel-good factor – but it also helps them keep the faith with recycling, at a time when it is being challenged as a middle-class con.
Far from it. Admittedly, recycling is not the easy fix we once thought it was: it won't "save the planet" and it is turning out to be a lot more complicated than we first thought. But doing nothing isn't an option and the long-term benefits are undeniable.
Whoever said keeping the faith was easy?
"Recycling is delivering great environmental benefits," says Wrap's chief executive, Dr Liz Goodwin, "and there is absolutely no reason for them to stop."
